


Bucky Barnes and the Winter Woman

by RedBlazer



Series: Bucky Barnes and the Case of "Everyone I Know is Way Cooler than I am" [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Assassins & Hitmen, Awesome Pepper Potts, BAMF Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, F/M, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Iron Man 3 Spoilers, Kidnapping, Librarians, Libraries, M/M, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Not Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Steve Rogers, Past Brainwashing, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Post-Iron Man 3, Protective Steve Rogers, Spies & Secret Agents, Winter Soldier Peggy Carter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 14:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4880734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedBlazer/pseuds/RedBlazer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghosts don't exist. Logically that's what Bucky keeps reminding himself. Still, it doesn't explain how she can be standing in the corner staring at him.</p><p>She's supposed to be dead. Dead since the war. It's impossible.</p><p>But then again, Bucky's life has turned out to be filled with nothing but impossible things.</p><p>THIS FIC IS ON A HIATUS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bucky Barnes and the Winter Woman

**Author's Note:**

> READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. It will be a long time before this fic is updated and fleshed out, I have other things planned.
> 
> An explanation of what is happening with this story can be found here:
> 
> http://helloredblazer.tumblr.com/post/151542975637/whatever-happened-to-bucky-barnes-and-the-winter
> 
>  
> 
> Yo! You should read the story that comes before this in the series for backstory on Bucky and Steve's relationship!
> 
> In general, this story will be darker than 'I Understood that Reference' but I'd like to say right now that I have no intention of graphically describing action, Injury or any kind of torture. It's not what I enjoy reading or writing. So if you are worried that this story may trigger something, keep that in mind. There will be themes of brainwashing and experiments on one of the main characters in the past. That might be disturbing to you.

Trouble has always had a way of finding him. It began with Peter Parker. The kid would get beaten up on the playground all the damn time until Bucky marched up to the leader of the gang of Rosemary’s Babies and decked their leader in the nose hard enough to break it.

And that meant a suspension for Bucky—though it wasn’t nearly as long as the one the bully got—and Parker never left him alone for the next eight years they went through school together.

So it stands to reason that running into Parker just spells trouble in general. Even more so now that he’s a photographer for The Daily Bugle.

“Aww, come on Bucky.” Parker whines, trailing after Bucky through the stacks of the library. His camera is slung over his shoulder as usual. “A man’s gotta eat!”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Peter, asking me what Steve’s like in bed ain’t respectable journalism.”

“Okay, that one we’ll call off the record.” Parker tells him, relenting. “That was more curiosity than anything.”

“You want an exclusive with Steve Rogers’ boyfriend.” Bucky grumbles. “I get it. But you’re not gonna get it.”

“What is the point of being your childhood bestie if you won’t even throw me a bone?” Parker says dramatically. Bucky turns around and holds up a metal middle finger at him.

“The pleasure of my company?” Bucky asks. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen you in months, Peter. I know you’re busy with chasing Spiderdude all over the city or whatever.”

“Spiderman.” Peter corrects, adjusting his glasses.

“Whatever.” Bucky repeats. “I thought you were just a photographer.”

Peter makes a low grumbling sound. “That’s not enough to pay the bills. Aunt May’s care facility pretty much takes everything. I’m crashing at my girlfriend’s place right now. And she lives with a bunch of broke actors. It’s a flaming trash can away from Rent. I gotta dig myself out.”

Bucky reaches out and pats Peter on the shoulder. “Sorry about that, man.” He makes a note to ask his mom where May is so he can send her a card and stop by. “But I don’t understand why an interview with me is going to help.”

“Steve Rogers is hot right now what with the Smithsonian’s exhibition.  I’m working on a profile about him to sell to a paper for some quick cash. If I could get a exclusive interview with Steve’s current partner, I really stand a chance at someone like the Times paying attention. And then paying me, of course.” Peter explains. He pulls a file out of his bag and flips it open to a few photos of Steve and Bucky out running, and a paparazzi photo of them walking out of the library.

“Look, Peter. I love you, man. But I haven’t spoken to any press so far. And I’m not going to start. It was hard enough for Steve and I to have privacy when everywhere we go people take our photo.” Bucky tells him. And he feels like an asshole, but he’s just not comfortable letting the public in on what it’s like to date the eighth wonder of the world.

Peter closes the folder and hands it to Bucky. “Just look at the stuff I was able to dig up. I’m not looking for a trashy story here, I want to tell the real story about Steve Rogers and how he became the man he is today. I was able to track down the last living Howling Commando, Gabe Jones. His grandson is an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Great guy, we skyped for over two hours. That guy is up with the times. He has a phone three years newer than mine.” Peter’s rambling a mile a minute at Bucky.

Bucky’s metal hand curls around the folder. “Alright, I’ll take a look at it.” He agrees mostly to placate Peter.

\-------

“That guy who plays Daario Naharis is on Orphan Black too, right?” Steve yells into the phone over the static. “I’m not crazy?”

Bucky winces, the phone pressed directly to his ear because he needs both of his hands to fold his clothes. “Yeah, I’m not totally caught up though. We’ll need to marathon when I get there.”

“Yeah, I need to run to Home Depot too.” Steve yells. “I keep accidentally ripping the cabinet pulls out of the wood.”

Bucky snorts. “Of course you do.”

“Yeah yeah yeah, I’m a big strong ox. Laugh all you want.” Steve grumbles over the phone. The static rises in pitch.

“Jesus, where are you?” Bucky asks.

“Not sure! No landmarks!” Steve says, slyly getting past whatever protocol they make him use so that Bucky won’t get black-bagged for knowing government secrets. “I’m on a boat! Successful mission. Heading back to the states.”

Bucky sighs. “That’s good. Now get back here so I can make out with your dumb face.”

“You say the sweetest things.” Steve tells him softly. “I’ll see you tonight.”

They say their gross sappy goodbyes and then Bucky hangs up the phone.

He always packs too much for the amount of time he spends actually wearing clothes when he and Steve are together for the weekend.

Bucky hangs up the phone and closes his suitcase. He slings his backpack over his shoulder and heads out to the train station.

\--------

And what a perfect time to read all the research Peter did on Steve than on then train after Bucky realizes he forgot his book and his phone is being really unruly.

There’s a lot of the usual stuff, the same military photo of Steve before the serum that shows up in the news sometimes, the promotional material of Cap when he went on tour with the showgirls, and a slightly blurry photo of the Howling Commandos all covered in dirt and looking worse for ware.

He flips that photo over, in cursive handwriting it says. “Cap and recovered soldiers. First solo mission. Stark and Carter not pictured.”

Bucky looks through the papers. Its mostly a lot of records with largely redacted sections. Then he gets to the transcribed interview with the senior agent Jones.

 

_P.P.: Tell me about the first mission Captain Rogers conducted._

_G.J.: Well, I wouldn’t call it a mission. No one gave the order for him to come. In fact, probably the only reason that he didn’t get raked over the coals is because he recovered Agent Carter. Next to Cap, no one knew the most about the Super Soldier Project. I was on the short list for that, I’ll have you know. Even met Steve when he was as skinny as a string bean._

_P.P.: So is that how Rogers and Carter knew each other?_

_G.J.: Oh yes, Carter was there from the beginning. British covert operations. MI-6. Very much in the shadows of what was happening in the public sphere. Agent Carter was our assigned liaison. When we were captured by Zola, they knew exactly who they were looking at. They had so much more intelligence than we expected._

_P.P.: What did they do to her while you were in captivity?_

 

Bucky looks up from the paper in surprise. Her.

Outside, the sunny afternoon light spills across the pages in his lap. The pretty blonde woman sitting across from him looks up at him and smiles, shyly looking back down at her magazine. The bride on the cover looks like a cupcake with a torso and a head.

 

_G.J.: Nothing good, I’ll tell you that. She was never the same after that. Physically she was mostly shaken up by the time Cap arrived. But she was so much more serious than the woman I’d served with for nearly a year._

_P.P.: It’s hard to find a concrete answer, but in what research I’ve done, it looks like they were experimenting to have a Super Soldier Program of their own. They experimented on Agent Carter, too._

_G.J.: Oh yeah, they took men out of the hold and they didn’t come back. Ever. Peggy—Agent Carter was the only one did. And when it was with Cap—well, I’ll be honest. We’d heard about the war bonds tour. We thought he was a joke. But he saved us. All of us. And then we were the Howling Commandos. We were famous within the armed forces. No one else knew who we were, but that was okay._

_P.P.: Were Agent Carter and Captain Rogers in a relationship?_

_G.J.: Now that’s difficult. They were inseparable. At times it seemed like they wouldn’t be able to stand without the other to lean on. Incredible woman. Really, the best of all of us. And she was treated so poorly by the higher ups because she was a woman. But she had a mean right hook and she didn’t play around. She wasn’t the kind of woman who let romance get in the way of what was happening on the warfront. But there were rumors. Shared tents, Steve sneaking off for hours at a time, and long nights of tactical plans. I know they cared for each other deeply. When we lost Carter, I though Steve was going to crush Zola’s head in his bare hands._

_P.P.: I don’t mean to pry, but there’s literally no information about her passing. I found that her grave is in Bath, England. But there’s nothing indicating the date of her passing._

_G.J.: She was never recovered. And when Cap was gone—we made it our mission to find her. But the mountain pass where she fell was completely buried under a rock fall that took out the bridge following the end of the war. One of the regrets of my life is that no one ever knew what a sacrifice she made. No one knows the name Peggy Carter. Her grave has nothing but her name on it. No birthdate. Nothing. She was there. And then she just wasn’t._

 

Bucky turns the page, running his other hand through his hair. He hadn’t even realized it, but his metal hand had creased the page in the place where he had been holding it. How is it possible that Steve never mentioned this woman who was so important to him?

Rationally he knows that the trauma of losing Agent Carter might be too much to bring up again. And Bucky doesn’t want Steve to dwell on losing her. But they’ve been together for two years now. And nothing.

There’s an ache beginning to form in his chest as he combs through the file for a photo of Agent Carter. It’s petty. But he wants to see what she looks like.

He’s panicked by the time he gets to the last page and there’s nothing. Bucky flicks the folder closed and goes to throw it into his bag. A small square of paper falls from the folder and floats towards the ground.

“Oh! I’ll get it.” The woman across from him exclaims, reaching out with deft fingers. She holds the piece of paper between two long and slender fingers.

“Thanks.” Bucky sighs. He adjusts his glasses, squinting at the dull words written on the back, ‘Agent Peggy Carter’. The woman smiles and hands him the photo, blushing as she leans forward in her seat.

He takes the picture and flips it over. And of course she’s beautiful. Even in the black and white photo, her brown hair is a series of glossy waves pulled away form her face. Her lips are held in a smirk despite the official looking photo. Judging by the shade of gray, Bucky thinks she might be wearing lipstick. Her eyes are large and almond shaped; there are kind looking smile lines around the corners.

“Pretty girl.” The woman across from him says.

“Sure is.” Bucky mutters, looking up at her.

It’s the smirk that makes him realize. Because those eyes are nothing like the ones in the photo. They’re dead now that Bucky actually looks at them. Her mouth is set in the same line as the Agent Carter in the photo, pulled up on one side.

“Peggy?” Bucky’s voice falters, a roaring static rising in his ears.

“Who’s Peggy?” She asks in a perfectly inflected American accent. Her hand flashes out from behind her magazine.

Bucky vaguely registers a small metal disk sticking to the metal of his left hand before his body is seized in a brief but incredibly powerful electric shock. He can’t even yell, make any of his muscles move.

Peggy Carter lays down her magazine and crosses her arms over her chest. She’s the last thing Bucky sees before he loses consciousness.

\--------

Underneath stacks of magazines, boxes of spare parts, and the general chaos that pervades Tony Stark’s lab; there is a tablet. Just a simple unit to run diagnostics outside of the lab. Tony put it together as an afterthought on a night when he couldn’t sleep and then pretty much forgot about it all together.

Only now it’s beeping.

“In the corner! I think it’s coming from the corner!” Tony yells from his place in the reclined hospital bed they set up for him up here. Bruce and Pepper both look up at him with exasperated expressions on their faces. “Calling it like I hear it! It’s coming from over there.” Tony points with an arm, his chest twinging along the line of stitches over the incision. Turns out that recovering from open-heart surgery isn’t the simple process that Tony had assumed it would be. He’s been bedridden for a week now.

Pepper shakes her bangs out of her eyes and shucks off the blazer she has on. This is weirdly turning Tony on. But Bruce is here, so he’s gonna try to rein it in. The pain meds don’t help his already faulty brain to mouth filter.

“If you didn’t keep this place so messy, we would be able to find it.” Pepper reminds him. She pushes up the sleeves of her shirt and cautiously walks into the rubble that litters Tony’s lab.

“Bruce!” Tony interjects.

Bruce sighs, looking put upon. “Tony thinks that innovation and chaos are linked. He can’t work in a sterile environment.”

Pepper looks at him over her shoulder and regards Tony with a cold look. “Oh, someone is going to be sterile soon.”

Okay, not turned on anymore. Threatened now. Tony does his best to shoot Pepper a charming smile. Bruce has made it to the pile of debris in the corner. He plants two hands on the top of the stack and pushes it down. It goes everywhere. Trash and scrap metal. Maybe a small and irreplaceable statue that Pepper bought for him at an auction in Paris last year.

She picks it up and looks over at Tony. “We’re going to turn those Sentinel suits into maids when they’re off duty. It’s happening.” Pepper puts the statue down on Tony’s desk with some force behind it.

Meanwhile, Bruce is now kneeling in the pile and shifting mounds of it away from the center. The beeping sound grows louder as they get closer.

“Ah!” Bruce calls, reaching into the pile and drawing forth a small tablet about the size of his hand. He taps a few buttons on the edges of it, but nothing happens. “Biometric override I think!” He tosses the tablet to Pepper, and then falls down on his retreat from the garbage pile.

Pepper is flushed and there’s sweat at her temples when she arrives to Tony’s bedside. She hands over the tablet.

“I don’t even know what this is.” Tony grumbles. Still, he presses his thumb to the screen and the alarm shuts off. He holds the tablet up, eyes passing over the screen to figure out what is happening. He feels his heart sink in his chest as he realizes what it is. There’s a small readout, just a steady level of activity until half an hour ago when the alarm started going off.

He put together the tablet on Steve’s suggestion more than anything, and then he forgot about it, of course. Because of Victor Von Doom or some issue that Mr. Fantastic and his even more fantastic wife roped the Avengers into.

It was supposed to be more for Steve’s peace of mind than anything. Just a little trinket to make sure that everything on the home front was good.

The tablet monitors a few censors discreetly placed all over the city. One on the wings Tony built for Sam, one each on the comms units that the team wears that monitors their vitals, and just a tiny relay inside the arm Tony built for Bucky. It would probably be a total invasion of privacy if it weren’t incredibly sweet that Steve wanted to keep track of all the people in his life even when he wasn’t in the city.

And all the readouts are showing what they should.

Except for Bucky’s.

Tony reaches for the blankets that Pepper tucked around his legs and rips them off. His chest feels like it’s on fire just from that motion. Jesus, he should have left the shrapnel in there. A sweet gesture about his mental health is now the reason it’s going to be excruciating to get into the suit. “AH!” Tony exclaims, and he can feel the color draining out of his face.

“Tony!” Pepper’s cry of concern is far too familiar to Tony at this point. But Bruce is there too, he plants a strong hand on Tony’s shoulder and pushes him back down to the bed. Tony does not go quietly. He sometimes forgets just how strong Bruce is without the Other Guy. “Tony stop it! You’ll tear your stitches.”

“I have to get into the suit!” Tony cries, but he’s easily pined. Pepper takes the tablet from him and hands it to Bruce.

Bruce holds the tablet practically up to his nose rather than put on his glasses, which have probably fallen into the debris littering the lab. “Electrical override.” He shakes his head.

“I built that miniature arch reactor that powers the arm myself.” Tony shakes his head. “No one should be able to do that.”

Bruce nods, now running his hand over the tablet and hitting buttons. “Totally normal activity, then a spike, and nothing. A short in the system?”

Tony shakes his head. “No. Where is Bucky supposed to be?” There’s a cold sensation pooling in his gut. He looks to Pepper, remembering the panic of finding her with Extremis pulsing through her veins.

There’s a reason that Superman never tells anyone who he really is, it’s to keep Lois Lane out of harms way. Or as out of harms way as he can. But that’s a comic book and not real life. They’re all in the public eye.

No way they couldn’t be for the fact that none of them wear masks. Daredevil’s got the right idea of what to do. And at first tony thought the guy was running around in the a leather bondage suit. Steve’s got a million twitter followers when he mostly just retweets photos of dogs up for adoption in the area.

They’re too accessible. All of them.

Pepper wracks a hand through her hair as though remembering the schedules of every single person they know should be her responsibility. She’s good. But she’s not that good. And Tony didn’t have the foresight to put a GPS tracker in Bucky’s arm, because that would probably mean Bucky would actually kill him. “The library?” She says, worry ringing in her voice.

Bruce shakes his head. He pulls out his phone and beings scrolling, looking for something.

“Jarvis, I need you to pull up all of the cellular data from Bucky’s phone. Look at his messages and calendar for where he might be.” Tony tells the room, but then Jarvis’s soothing voice answers.

“Absolutely sir, pulling them up now. I’ll take a look at Captain Roger’s phone as well. Running a search on social media for anything mentioning Mr. Barnes.” Jarvis tells them, one of the holo-screens appears before Tony so that he can physically begin sifting through material.

“Wait.” Pepper exclaims, holding both of her hands out. “If something happened to Bucky—we need to tell Steve.”

Tony bites his lip. “I can’t go to him with no information.” Still, an icon with Steve’s face appears, and his location. “He’s at the Triskelion, all communications are being blocked.”

Pepper shakes her head. “This can’t be happening.” She closes her eyes for a beat, drawing a deep breath into her lungs and letting it out over several seconds, then she opens her eyes and nods. “Right. We need a plan.”

And just like that she’s the capable woman that Tony loves. Not that he doesn’t love her when she’s rambling and anxious. But there’s strength to Pepper that sometimes catches people off guard. Not Tony thought.

They met under less than savory circumstances. Tony, on a bender mistook Pepper’s beater of a Volkswagen for his Ferrari and tried to hotwire it in order to get home. Pepper found him, and rather than call the police, she drove him home and put him to bed. When he woke up, she had organized months worth of mail and gone grocery shopping with the cash she had found in the pocket of one of his jackets. She didn’t even look sheepish standing in his living room in her jean shorts and old college t-shirt when he woke up. Instead, she told him in no uncertain terms that he was going to die young and pretty like an idiot if he didn’t turn his life around.

And so he hired her on the spot.

It didn’t get better for a long time. It’s still not 100%. But Pepper makes it better. She makes him want to be better. And right now she’s dealing with this situation like she’s dealt with everything Tony could throw at her—with a minor freak out and then capability.

“Sir, I’ve located a mention of Mr. Barnes from earlier this morning.” Jarvis tells them coolly, pulling up a photo on the holoscreen of Bucky with his metal arm around a handsome young man with an expensive looking camera slung around his neck. “The caption reads, ‘#ThrowbackThursday, catching up with this asshole, @BuckyBarnes. #besties #nofilter #robot #TeamStucky #shamelessplug’ and it was posted to Instagram by PeterParkerPhotography.”

Tony squints at the photo, zooming in on the photo’s background. “This was taken in the library—there’s the scratch in the floor where I dropped the arm.”

“I’m going to call Clint, someone should go find this Parker guy and talk to him.” Pepper tells them, already dialing.

“What kind of moron would take a selfie with someone before—“ Tony stops himself. “Well, we don’t know what’s going on exactly. I highly doubt he has something to do with this.” He looks to Bruce, also dialing his phone. “What are you doing?”

Bruce doesn’t bother with a long explanation. “Don’t you think we should try to get in touch with Bucky before we scramble the jets?” He puts the phone up to his ear and nearly instantly is saying, “Hey Bucky, give us a call back when you get this. We received an alert that your arm went offline for some reason. And we’d like to get in touch with you just to make sure that you’re okay. This is Bruce, by the way.”

It’s kind of pathetic that Bruce was the first one to think of calling Bucky.

Bruce hangs up the phone and shakes his head. “Straight to voicemail.”

“Mr. Barnes’ phone is currently not receiving a signal.” Jarvis tells them helpfully. “It last pinged a cell tower in Virginia.”

Pepper covers the receiver of her phone and chimes in. “He was going to see Steve this weekend.” And then a sheepish look crosses her face. “I remember now. Steve and I talked a few weeks ago about the visit—because of reasons.”

“Okay—cryptic.” Tony tells her. Pepper’s already gone back to her phone call. “Jarvis, could you run a facial recognition on Bucky? All the screens we can access, and we’ll apologize for the ones we access that we don’t have permission to use. Use Rhodey’s credentials if you have to.”

“Facial recognition has been in progress for five minutes, Sir.” Jarvis says. “I feel I need to point out that the arm’s internal electrical pulse mechanism was not activated.”

Bruce furrows his eyebrows, though his hands haven’t stopped moving on the holoscreen he has pulled up. “So his heart didn’t stop beating?”

“Precisely.” Jarvis tells them, his calm voice echoing through the lab. Good to know that in a crisis, everyone but Tony perfectly capable of not losing their damn mind. “In the event of a medical emergency, the arm’s protocol would send an electrical pulse to Mr. Barnes’ heart in order to restart it. There’s no evidence to show that he is enough physical danger that would render him critically injured.”

“That’s good news.” Tony says, nodding. “But with the arm offline, that could be happening right now. We need to get that thing working again somehow.”

Pepper hangs up the phone. “Clint is on his way to Parker’s place. Maybe this guy has some idea of what is going on.”

“That’s good.” Tony says. Right now the only thing he wants is to get into the suit and go looking for Bucky himself. “That’s really good, Pepper. I’m going to deploy the Sentinels to Virginia to look for Bucky.”

“Bucky got onto a train bound for Washington D.C. at 11 this morning. It’s scheduled to arrive in ten minutes. Though the train is currently stuck on the tracks outside of the city. Engine failure.” Bruce tells them from his place, most likely hacking into Amtrak. “All trains in the eastern corridor have been shut down until the issue is resolved.”

“Who do we have in D.C.?” Tony asks, wracking his brain. “People we trust.”

Pepper ticks off on her fingers, “Rhodey is handling security in Geneva right now. Natasha should be available if she’s not with Steve. Obviously there’s Steve. Sam—“

“Sam!” Tony calls, pointing. “Get me Sam.”

\---------

It’s a sickening thing to wake up to, not being able to feel his left arm.

That split second of coming to consciousness and not being able to feel it at all wakes him instantly. It’s not something a person can really forget. And for months, Bucky lived from minute to minute forgetting and remembering that he had lost his left arm.

He springs to movement at that sickening feeling of loss. All of his limbs restrained and laying somewhere on a cold floor, he hears the deadened clunk of metal. His eyes fly open behind the blackness of a cloth covering his eyes as his heart pounds away in his chest over and over again. It’s like being back in the invasion, after he lost the arm. In shock and scrambling for some semblance of safety to hold on to.

What happened?

The women on the train. And then darkness. And then waking in darkness, able to feel everything in his body except for the cybernetic arm.

He stops his flailing for a moment, knowing he needs to calm himself before he flies off the handle and loses it completely.

The memory of waking from surgery the second time comes to the forefront. Steve kneeling there by his bedside and holding onto that miracle Tony built him, that arm that changed his life. And he remembers being unable to move one arm, the one that had been written in his DNA since he split from one cell into two, and then four, and then just kept on going.

Just because he can’t feel it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. He takes a deep breath, tilting his head to the left and resting it on his shoulder. He feels the hard metal of the shoulder joint against his ear and breaths a sigh of relief. For a second there he wasn’t sure if he was waking in some kind of world where the help he received never came.

\----------

By the time that Sam reaches the train, there’s police everywhere trying to figure out how to get the train over the bridge it’s currently on.

He has to land a little ways away and sneak through the woods to go undetected. Tony told him he could break into Rhodey’s apartment and steal a copy of his old military papers that give Rhodey seemingly limitless powers to intervene in Tony’s affairs. But there was too much of a chance that the police would realize that he wasn’t in fact the other man.

And if Bucky was in trouble, there wasn’t time to wind up in the backseat of a squad car with his wings seized and probably stolen within 24 hours.

So he has to ditch the wings in the woods and creep through the trees until he can see the train on the tracks. Luckily, the police and the engineers running the train are all crowded around the front, leaving the end of the train clear.

Except for the hundreds of people all stuck on the train. But who’s going to notice a man returning to his seat after sneaking out for a cigarette.

At least that’s what he tells the woman who stares at him when he walks onto the train. Though, she seems more content to stare down at the black screen on her phone in annoyance.

“Having some trouble there?” Sam asks, trying to sound casual.

The woman rolls her eyes and tosses the phone into her purse. “It went dead, everything went dead. Even the train. Didn’t you notice?”

Trying to feign sheepishness, he shrugs. “I fell asleep. I like to read mostly. Didn’t notice.”

She looks up at him, bemused. And then her eyes focus and she smiles. “Well, you could some sit with me, keep me company until the train gets moving again.”

Dammit. Seriously?

For Bucky, for Bucky Sam tells the incredibly attractive woman sitting there that his girlfriend probably wouldn’t like that, and moves on. He passes more and more people all trying their electronics to no avail. Well, there go his chances of calling Stark and telling him what’s going on.

It’s a packed train full of students, families, and commuters. Every seat he passes is taken by annoyed people.

Sam tries to keep his composure as much as possible as he scans the passengers for Bucky’s familiar face. Tony didn’t seem to have a complete idea of what happened to their friend. But Bucky’s arm mysteriously going offline didn’t bode well. And neither did a train full of dead tech.

Sam works his way to the last passenger car a the head of the train when he finds the only empty seats he’s seen. A set of four, one of them with an abandoned copy of a wedding magazine on the cushion.

He sits down in one of the seats as casually as he can, running his fingers under the seat for anything left behind. His fingers make contact with the worn leather strap of a backpack, pulling it forward.

That’s it then. Bucky’s bag but no Bucky. Sam looks around for anyone paying him attention. If Bucky was taken, it’s possible that there were multiple people involved. Sam’s dealt with enough hostage situations in the war to know there could be lookouts anywhere.

Sam stands, casually pulling off the two ticket stubs above the seats and sliding them into his pocket.

He slings the backpack over his shoulder as though its his own and strolls back the way he came, to the end of the train and the now even more annoyed woman who rolls her eyes when he passes.

Sam drops to the ground next to the train and takes off into the woods, unseen by the officers still scratching their heads as to what’s going on.

He takes out his earpiece and dials Tony as he runs. “What do we have?” Tony asks.

Sam can hear the sounds of other people in the room. He’s on speaker, though he doesn’t know who else is in the room with Tony. It’s gotta be someone who knows what’s going on. Tony doesn’t surround himself with people he doesn’t fully trust.

“No sign of Bucky.” Sam says. “His things are here. His backpack. There was another passenger missing. A woman judging by the magazine she was reading. No luggage above their seats.”

“Another hostage?” Bruce’s voice sounds.

“One person you can get off a train if there’s enough of a distraction. Two, that’s going to attract attention. Could be though. We should get ahold of a list of the people who purchased tickets.” Stark says. “What about the train?”

“The train and everything electronic on it went dead at the same moment.” Sam replies, dropping to the ground once he reaches his wings. He wants to look through the bag right now, but it would be safer to do that somewhere he could be sure he wasn’t being watched. “I’m willing to bet that’s when Bucky’s arm stopped working.”

“Give the man a prize.” Stark grumbles.

“We’re looking at some sort of localized EMP.” Bruce says, “That doesn’t just come from nowhere. Ironically they take a lot of power to set off.”

There’s a beat of silence that has Sam looking around for something off in the otherwise peaceful forest. If he wasn’t searching for his friend desperately, he would actually be enjoying this time away from the city.

He can feel himself slipping into a mindset he hasn’t experienced in years, that of a soldier. It briefly took hold of him two years ago when the attack on the city took place. But not actually being in the city at the time meant he was mostly sitting in his apartment in D.C., watching the news and calling every person he knew to tell them to get out.

Now though, there’s a very real threat to the life of his friend. And anything that interferes with someone affiliated with the Avengers spells something much larger at play.

“I’m heading back to my place. If you can get in touch with Steve, send him my way. I’ll go through the bag and tell you what I find.” Sam says, signing off.

\----------

Mission debriefing takes much longer than normal. Steve’s sequestered in a seldom used room with Natasha to work on a stack of reports. His signature is needed on an outrageous number of documents. He checks his watch and sighs, mowing through the last stack of papers. This is how people end up signing their lives away to the devil, but Steve’s pretty much had it with today. He initials and signs everything with barely a scan of its contents.

After all, if those helicarriers that Fury showed him existed without his knowledge, a few blindly signed forms couldn’t do too much damage. It was mostly just requisitions and permissions nonsense.

And that’s the moment that he realizes the absolute dumb move he’s made. Steve stands abruptly, Natasha looks up from the papers she’s working on at the desk beside his. She’s dutifully reading through everything they put before her, her mind clearly never satisfied unless she knows every little secret going on.

“Settle down soldier.” Natasha snorts, casting him a glance in passing. Tensions had been less than friendly after Steve caught her taking the information from the ship and nearly endangering the mission.

And he understands. It’s not like he hasn’t spent his own fair amount of time associated with a woman who knew where all of the bodies were buried. Peggy knew more about what turned Steve into the Super Soldier than he did. Had she been present through some sort of miracle the likes of which Steve’s only seen on Doctor Who, Peggy could have stopped the Hulk from existing.

“I gotta get out of here.” Steve tells her, picking up his stack of unfinished paperwork and marching it towards a random set of filing cabinets. He dumps the whole thing into the bottom drawer an kicks it closed with a foot as he turns around.

Natasha smirks, pointing at him with the pen in her hand. “And just like that, all of your work ethic has gone missing. Could it have anything to do with your boyfriend no doubt eating all of the food in your refrigerator and taking off all of his clothes? Probably at the same time. Weirdo.”

“It’s an emergency.” Steve grabs his keys and his jacket. His shield is sitting against the desk, Steve slings it over his shoulder, feeling its comfortable weight settle against his back. “I know we’re not as close as you and Bucky are. But, I need a favor.”

She sighs, standing from her desk and putting on her jacket. “You left it out didn’t you?”

Steve feels like hitting himself. “It’s not out, but it’s not hidden.”

Natasha’s already walking to the door, “I cannot believe you’re our team leader.”

“Just come with me and distract him so I can hide it.” Steve says, passing her as he marches out the door and into the hallway.

“You know you’re never going to hear the end of it if he’s seen it.” Natasha gloats. They fall into step, quickly walking towards the garage entrance where Steve’s motorcycle is parked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Steve sighs. They reach the motorcycle, Steve climbing on and Natasha behind him. He passes back his helmet to her. “How did you even know?”

“Psh.” Natasha waves a hand. “I know everything.”

And Steve doesn’t doubt that. The woman’s brain must hold more secrets than the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

They head over to Steve’s apartment at a speed that Steve’s not proud of from a legal standpoint. But all of the times he’s been pulled over, the officer pretty much assumes there’s some sort of emergency and let him go. So he chances it.

It’s a risk bringing Natasha back with him. For one thing, Bucky could be freaking the fuck out over his finding or he could be naked. And either way Natasha’s going to be seeing something that Steve would rather not have getting out to anyone else.

It’s practically impossible to keep a secret around any of their friends as it is. Stark’s always got an ear to their tech, Natasha and Clint are expert liars, and Bruce is just generally really observant. He’s amazed he’s gone this long without spilling the beans. But if there’s ever been a secret that needs keeping, it’s this one.

Luckily, they don’t hear the sounds of Bucky ranting to his mother on the phone when they climb the stairs to Steve’s apartment building. So Steve is a little less worried about the whole Bucky freaking out thing.

They pass his friendly next door neighbor on her way to take her laundry down to the machine. She smiles in passing at the both of them.

Steve and Natasha smile back in kind, keeping up the impression they’re not on a mission to save Steve’s ass at this very moment.

And then they hear it.

The jazz.

“Oh, I think that’s a check in the column for someone getting some. Are you sure you don’t want me to sneak in through a window and intercept the package before the commitment-phobic man in there sees it?” Natasha says lowly, smirking. She raises an eyebrow at Steve.

There’s a lot Natasha knows about Bucky. She’s an amazing observer of behavior.

But she doesn’t know Bucky as well as Steve does.

Steve holds out a hand, stopping her in the hallway to the apartment. He shakes his head, pointing at the door. Natasha reaches under her jacket, drawing out one of the compact guns she keeps there. She holds up a hand signaling, ‘I’ve got your six.’

And whatever passed between them earlier falls away, because there’s a sinking feeling passing through him.

Steve loves jazz. So much so that he thought it would be romantic to take Bucky to a little jazz club in Brooklyn for a date. They both dressed up, had a intimate dinner near the place and then walked over holding hands.

To his credit, Bucky made it ten minutes until he broke and told Steve that if he didn’t take him home that second, Bucky was going to rip his own ears off.

Bucky despises Jazz. And Steve loves Bucky. So he uses his time at the apartment in DC to listen to jazz to his heart’s content. So when they come back together, Steve’s got it out of his system.

And there’s jazz coming from under the crack in the heavy oak door to his apartment.

Steve pulls the shield from off of his back and advances to the door, turning the handle in one smooth motion and pushing the door open. Unlocked. And inside, the whole place is in darkness.

He and Natasha don’t make so much as a sound crossing the floorboards through the kitchen toward the living room. They sweep the room in practiced movements, keeping their backs to one another. Years of fighting together have left them pretty in sync when it comes to fighting.

“I hope you don’t mind. I let myself in.” Nick Fury’s familiar voice filters in through the apartment. Steve stops abruptly, hitting switch that turns on the lamp in the corner. He’s sitting in the leather armchair Steve refinished last winter, holding onto his side. There’s blood on his hands and staining his clothes. The soft light coming from the window to the street outside casts heavy shadows over his face.

Natasha hits the lights, sending them into darkness again. And that feeling of rising panic is beginning to make itself known again.

“What about the man of the house? He wasn’t here?” Natasha asks. Bucky. She’s asking if Bucky was here when Fury arrived.

Fury shakes his head. “Heard he ran into traffic on the way.”

Bucky took the train. Natasha tenses even more if that’s possible. Steve can see her out of the corner of his eye taking off to clear the rest of the rooms. And he should go with her.

Steve curls his hand into a fist by his side. It’s taking everything in him not to tear through the apartment for Bucky. But someone needs to stay with Fury and figure this all out.

“He’s dedicated though. My girl though—my girl kicked me to the curb.” Nick says. He holds up his phone, ‘EARS EVERYWHERE’.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Steve says as calmly as he can. His eyes scan the darkened room as well as they can, pausing on the eye of the webcam on the front of his computer in the corner.

“Me too.” Fury feigns casualty. Holding up his phone again it reads, ‘SHIELD COMPROMISED. BARNES MIA.’

Steve swallows against the lump rapidly forming in his throat. All of the hair on the back of his neck stands on end in a primal warning fight or flight.

“Who else knows?” Steve asks tightly.

“You and Nat. Friends and family.” Fury responds.

Natasha arrives back in the living room, having cleared the rest of the place. She gives him the ‘all clear’ signal.

Logically, the muzzle flash across the street doesn’t happen with enough warning for them to do anything before the bullet passes through the window and hits Fury in the chest so hard he jerks forward in the chair and falls to the ground.

Steve’s eyes narrow on the roof of the office building across the street where a figure in black turns and disappears from sighs.

“Nat?” Steve barks as he takes a few steps backwards to the wall.

“Got it.” She tells him, already on the ground with her hands pressing on the wound in Fury’s chest.

Steve puts the shield out in front of him as he takes off running full force at the window. It’s not the longest distance he’s had to jump. The Red Skull’s factory springs to mind. Peggy sagging against the opposite wall, Steve’s jacket around her shoulders and flames reflecting in her eyes.

He crashes through the window opposite, rolling onto the carpet and then onto his feet through muscle memory.

That clinical part of his brain is taking over. And though he can feel his heart pumping away in his chest, the world has narrowed to shortcuts and loopholes as he takes off running. Compartmentalization. That’s what the military shrinks called it. It’s what made it possible for Steve to get anything done without the crippling fear of loosing everyone in his unit taking over.

And now it leads him through the office building, through doors and at one point a wall. He knows he’s catching up when he sees the figure in black drop down off of the roof of the building they’re in onto the one next door.

And once again through the window out into the cool night air. The figure is running toward the edge, making a break for freedom.

Steve winds up with the shield and lets it fly towards them, whistling through the air.

It’s at the last second when the figure spins around, a heavy boot on an otherwise slender leg knocking the shield the ground as easily as batting away a fly. Observing them now, he can only see their shadow against the night sky, smaller than he expected. They’re dressed in a tactical vest, a pair of black leggings, and a mask covering their nose and mouth.

The blonde hair in a long braid over their shoulder clues him in.

A woman. A woman drawing a pistol from her thigh holster and firing off shots at him before she even stops moving her arm to aim properly.

Steve’s forced to dive behind an air vent to avoid the same fate as Fury back at his apartment. When he recovers enough to make a break for the shield on the ground a little ways away, there’s nothing there to fight.

She’s gone.

They're both gone.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Kudos and talking with you in the comments. I'm helloredblazer on tumblr!


End file.
